The present disclosure generally relates to social networking systems and more specifically to analyzing financial transaction habits of social networking system users.
Social networks, or social utilities that track and enable connections between users (including people, businesses, and other entities), have become prevalent in recent years. In particular, a social networking system allows users to more efficiently communicate information that is relevant to their friends or other connections in the social network. Social networks typically incorporate a system for maintaining connections among users in the social network and links to content that are likely to be relevant to the users. Social networks also collect and maintain information about the users of the social network. This information may be static, such as geographic location, employer, job type, age, music preferences, interests, and a variety of other attributes, or it may be dynamic, such as tracking a user's actions within the social network.
Additionally, a social networking system may receive information describing its users' interactions with entities external to the social networking system. For example, social networking system users may purchase goods or services from vendors at physical retail locations or using websites associated with the vendors and elect to share this information with the social networking system. Incorporating this external information allows the social networking system to obtain additional information about its users, allowing the social networking system to provide a wider range of information to its users. Because social networking system users are likely to have diverse interests and demographic characteristics, including external information into the social networking system allows further analysis of social networking system users.